It is a mere truism that no one at any age can resist toys; is not the toy aspect of motor-cars, guns, aeroplanes, and the latest thing in cameras an important part of their attraction? Father and uncle playing with Willy's train, while Willy is stood in the corner for naughti interfering, is a perfectly true type. And now the Christmas toy show is quite as delightful to grown-ups as to children, the more so that at least four-fifths of the toys are British-made, the German toymakers who once dominated our shops having been almost entirely beaten out by our own people.
Of course the mechanism of the age is strongly represented. Clock-failing attraction; these lead on the young mind to the model train clubs now numerous all over England, whose members take part in difficult problems of shunting in model goods yards and combining model express atid suburban service. But searchlights and anti-aircraft guns are plentiful, with tanks and army lorries alas for the pacifist teachings of yesteryear; we must be military-minded now.
Theatrical and cinema popularities supply several models. There are innumerable Shirley Temple dolls (but the increased liking for dolls of all sorts seems significant, as if Nature were fighting back desperately against declining birth-rates) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are conspicuous everywhere, as are Stanley Lupino and his Sally and a company of Lambeth Walkers. These come nearer to a child's real conception of a toy than any mechanical conception forever doing the same thing, in that they stir the child's imagination to weave its own stories, about the beloved objects. And "in this way nothing can equal the furry kittens. rabbits, ducks, dogs, bears, and, of course, dolls.
Considering the enormous masses of stuff written nowadays for and about children, it is curious how Itttle of it really gets inside that strange thing, the child's mind. A girl friend said to me recently: "I remember when I vas little, that I liked "Christopher Robin' and things e that, quite well. But my feeling about Stevenson's 'A Child's Garden of Verse' was quite different, He was a child, thinking and writing as a child would." So of toys, grown-ups may play with them, but in designing want to play with.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.